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lunes, 10 de noviembre de 2014

Milan Kundera, fragment from immortality

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He said good-bye to her and as she disappeared
round the corner of the street he was seized by a strong, tormenting nostalgia
for the women of his past. It was as brutal and unexpected as a disease that
breaks out, in one second, without warning.

He slowly began to realize what it was about. The
hand on the dial had touched a new number. He heard the clock strike, saw the
little window open and, thanks to the mysterious medieval mechanism, a woman in
huge tennis shoes came out. Her appearance meant that his longing made a
volte-face; he would no longer yearn for new women; he would only yearn for
women he had already had; from now on, his longing would be an obsession with
the past.

He saw beautiful women walking down the street
and was startled that he paid no attention to them. I even believe that they
noticed him, and he didn’t know it. Before he had yearned only for new women. He
had yearned for them to such a degree that with some of them he had made love
only once and no more. As if he were now destined to atone for his obsession
with the new, his indifference to everything lasting and stable, his foolish
impatience that drove him forward, he now wished to turn himself round, to find
the women of his past, to repeat their love-making, to carry it further, to
make it yield all that had been left unexploited. He realized that from now on
great excitements were to be found only behind him, and if he wanted to find
new excitements he would have to turn to his past.